Like most of the work in the show, I first encountered Kenyssa’s work on my cell phone, in a text message from curator Anthony White. The piece he sent me originally was a deep blue image that I assumed was a self portrait, if not a portrait of someone else, with little to no features distinguishable beside their silhouette, and a deep red, orange, and eventually yellow radiating from the center of their body (if you click on Evans’ name above and peruse her website you will find it). I knew the work wasn’t decide on yet that would be in the show, but I new whatever was decided would have the remarkable vibrancy found across the whole exhibition of In Crystallized Time. When finally encountering the work in real life, I was standing over them in the gallery, where a rush of discoveries interrupted my regularly scheduled program of thoughts.
Julia Monté: I loved standing over the pieces sent and seeing how the work had a texture I didn't expect. The mesh creates those seductive waves as well that adds another rhythm to the details, like it is a visual humming. For these pieces in particular, beyond the texture and transparency, why is the mesh screen an important substrate for these photographs?
Kenyssa Evans: I like that you mention how the work has a texture you didn’t expect. The use of the mesh material stems from window/door screens. I always viewed this material to be intimate, allowing the viewer to gaze through a space. When looking more into the material I became more interested in the abstraction and illusion it can allude to. With this series, I wanted to use something that the viewer expects more from the subject but that becomes blurred in the space, creating a threshold between the viewer finding themselves either inside or outside but in an abstract location preventing them from further engagement. The transparency facilitates a spatial-temporal moment of reflections in which multiple realities collide due to the activity in the space.
JM: The blue pigment reminds me of a cyanotype, which brings me to think about memory and impressions and exposure… but is there a significant reason for you that these colors are the most activated in each image?
KE: I get the cyanotype reference often but the pigment actually is inspired by chroma key blue that you see with projectors and a space of production. Rather the color normally refers to a way for the projector to tell you it does not have a signal to display or something in the making, this color becomes a metaphor of conscious and unconscious content. For the viewer experiencing the pieces, it leaves them in a space where their imagination can be exposed. For the subject it activates a state of flux with no specific time period that you can easily attribute them to, it's timeless where the subjects are fleeting, unreachable, serving as an artificial display. It all operates as solemnity, distance, and fluidity.
JM: In regards to your bio, when you said you are “focusing on time and representation on Black imaginary, process, and refusal…” I feel like there are so many factors wrapped up in each one of those ideas. I am picking up on the complexities within “refusal,” there is a refusal happening in both directions, where Black identities have been met with the refusals of erasure/whitewashing, and your practice works to “reject the western structure of Blackness.” Is there something specific in the “process” that mirrors the process of you making this work?
KE: My process begins with revisiting my father’s documentation of my family. The images and videos he captured create a conversation of subverting forced identities. It showed me from an early age that Black existence is more than what the media shows and dominates which is often negative. If anything, these negative representations made being myself seem even less possible. But upon revisiting my father's documentation opened a portal for me to develop self-love and introduce me to the concept of the Black aesthetic in which pushed me to take control of the lens from creating a canvas that resists easy representation and shattering the boundaries of western-influenced geopolitically spaces.
JM: How does technology and awareness of the digital landscape that tends to lend to building out our identities influence your work? I especially think about its interference with time. Or disorientation.
KE: Disorientation is a big part of my work moving forward. Part of my image-making process and the way I want to confront the space of my work refers back to Simone Browne’s concept of “dark sousveillance”, a term that is described to be “tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight.” She describes an idea of these freedom tactics of using the same technologies that dehumanize Black individuals to subvert and be used against, which I have been working with on different levels in my work. Technology at the start of colonialism through lantern laws and contemporary times of floodlights and cameras continues to illuminate Black and Brown identities in a dehumanizing way. So, it starts with me critiquing the privilege of viewership and visibility. Using technology that is often used for social control, such as light, material, and the camera, I appropriate and repurpose it in order to facilitate abstractness of subjecthood making the subject or their environment less hypervisible, close to anonymous, in control of their identity as it circulates in our digital landscape in the gaze of others.
JM: My last question I have is, what problems or considerations do you find yourself in front of as you make this work and put it into other spaces?
KE: I think there are lots of contradictions in my work. For instance, I want the work to be partially obscured and fragmented working in the frame of absence and non-performance. But I often catch myself doing too much that it works against the frame and it becomes overwhelming at times with performance. When I put it in other spaces I consider the beauty of the contradictions because it creates tension of opposites, such as between fixed and mutable, disorderly and control. I think it finds common ground when it intertwines with time and evolves in different forms.
Image credit: Dom Nieri
Thank you to Kenyssa Evans for taking the time to virtually chat with me. Click on Evans’ name to access her website.